Labor is frequently a major cost associated with manufacturing wooden articles, such as moldings, shutters, picture frames, hangers, window sills and the like. Nevertheless, wood is commonly used in making such articles because of its aesthetic beauty and physical properties. Various plastics could be easily molded into such articles. However, such plastic articles typically lack many of the desired physical properties of wood. For this reason moldable plastics have not been a satisfactory substitute for wood in manufacturing many types of articles wherein the physical properties of wood is desired.
Billions of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles containing a wide variety of carbonated beverages are being sold to consumers. This results in hundreds of millions of pounds of PET bottles which must be disposed of annually. For environmental and economic reasons, it would be highly desirable to find additional uses for this vast amount of scrap PET beverage bottles. For example, it would be highly desirable to recycle scrap PET into useful products.